Elizabeth Willetts Camp | 1915-2002

I spoke this past weekend at my grandmother’s funeral. She had been suffering from Parkinson’s for a number of years and spent the past year or so in steep decline.

When you’re the youngest in your family, you get used to the idea of funerals pretty quickly. I know that I will be burying a lot of people that I love in the years to come. And so I’m often rehearsing what I will say for each of them, as a surviving member of the family and the proxy Speaker for the Dead.

I had been rehearsing for my grandmother’s funeral for a number of months. A few nights before the service, I sat up until 2 AM in the lobby of the hotel where we were all staying, waiting for my family to arrive. To pass the time, I wrote out the thoughts that had been rattling around in my head, everything I had been thinking about as I anticipated the inevitable funeral and what I might say in remembrance of my father’s mother.

A few days later, I got up and spoke a distilled version of what I wrote.

Here is the full message as I wrote it that night in the hotel lobby…

I am Elizabeth’s grandson, one of the West Coast Camps as they call us, although I live in Michigan now and have no intention of leaving.

Unlike my cousins and my older brothers, I didn’t enjoy a long relationship with my grandmother. My memories of her before a certain age (say twelve or thirteen years old) are few, chiefly related to episodes or events: A visit back east during the holidays, a wedding, the infrequent trip my grandparents made to California once or twice.

One of these — and this is probably my strongest memory of her, in that it is the first time I can recall when she and I spoke together, we talked person to person without the barrier of age or relationship — this was the summer my oldest brother got married, a summer of change in our family, a time of transition for all of us. My grandparents came to see us, to come for the wedding and I have many memories from that time, the most detailed of which is my memories of talking with Elizabeth about books.

I was well into my career as a reader by then, reading everything that came in front of me. A reader who would never stop reading, who would always have a book there close at hand . . . or two or three.

Elizabeth and I found in each other that summer a common ground borne out of a shared enjoyment and enthusiasm for books, for words put together well. The people who know me now know me because of my voice, my words, the amount of time I spend in putting them together. That is to say, I talk a lot.

And such is Elizabeth’s legacy as well.

We would read things that summer, she started reading what I was reading. And if it was strange to have your grandmother reading science fiction and horror and fantasy along with you, I didn’t know it at the time.

I gave her books, said “This one is good, the stories are good but don’t read that one because it really is a little creepy, a little too scary. You probably won’t like it.” And after she had read the book, including the one or two I told her to avoid, we’d talk about them. She’d say “Ooh, you were right. That one was awful. I said to myself that I shouldn’t read it, but I couldn’t help it.” Even then, I understood that we were talking about the inevitability of words. Even then, the words I am saying now were inevitable
. . . even then.

Elizabeth was the first person to read anything that I had written. She read my first story. The first time I wrote something down, put words down in a particular, inevitable order . . . in order to take what was in my head and capture it there on the page for someone else.

She was also the first person to say this to me: “You could do this.”

And I am. I write every day. Although I’m not a real capital-W Writer (and how I wish, I wish every day, that I could say “I’m not a Writer, yet“) but I continue to write, with that “yet” hanging there in front of me.

Over the years, a lot of people have told me that I can write, that I can be (or am) what I aspire to be, what I desire to be, that the thing I want and pray for every day, the thing that I slowly build it up with every word that I write, every play, every story, every poem. They tell me that I can do it. And I’m always grateful and embarrassed to hear it (it’s mildly embarrassing to say this to all of you now). It’s a comfort and a validation and a grace when people say it to me.

But Elizabeth was the first.

Here is my word to all of you here today, but particularly to my family — my cousins and brothers, my aunts and uncles and parents, and to my grandfather — here is the word I have been given to speak:

A few months ago my son came home from school with a bible verse to be learned. With my background in the theatre, I believe that it’s not enough to learn something by memory. You have to learn it by heart. You have to understand what it means. You have to hold the meaning in your mind, so that the verse you have learned becomes more than just words shuffled into your short-term memory. It must be understood, absorbed.

This conversation with Sam — named for Elizabeth’s father, incidentally — led to a discussion of Heaven. And I tried very hard to explain to my son that Heaven is more than a place or a destination, that it is a broader thing than the last stop on a somewhat difficult and uncomfortable journey.

Heaven is a reunion, a gathering of the creation back into the arms of the Creator. Heaven is a time as much as it is a place, when all of us are taken into the arms of our Creator again, finally when all is reconciled and made whole, when all has been reunited.

Here is my word: We are a family defined by distance.

Because of how our family has been led across the face of this country over the years — the hand of the Creator tugging us here and there to find our own place — we are a family that is founded on reunion.

We come together in small groups, sometimes in lager gatherings, to reunite, to reconnect, and although the trips we sometimes have to take to get to these times of reunion are often hard or costly or frustrating (kids in the backseat, empty coke cans rolling around on the floor, the map all tangled up and tempers running short, the long trip home with tired and cranky children in tow) I don’t think there are any of us who regret the reunion, who look back and say “I wish we hadn’t gone…”

Even today, this week, who here can regret the reunion we’ve enjoyed because of the sadness that brought us together?

I don’t.

I don’t regret it, and so here is my word: I believe in reunion. I believe that our small one here today, the ones that we have had over the years and the ones we will have as the years go on, are a glimpse of the true reunion that is waiting for us all. It is waiting for us, prepared by our Creator, made ready by the hand that formed our family and guides us now. The reunion is waiting.

And so is Elizabeth. She is there. She got there ahead of us, sharing in the reunion with her parents and her brother and the others in her family who got there ahead of her.

I believe in reunion, I believe Elizabeth is there, waiting for us. And I believe that one day I will be there with her, leaving my family behind while I go on ahead. And while they all gather and have their own reunion and remember me, I will have already joined the great reunion.

We are a family defined by distance . . . and the dream of a reunion greater than we enjoy here today. Elizabeth is there. And though the trip was hard, there is no now more sickness or sorrow or sadness for her . . . and the joy and comfort we feel today in being together is but a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the reunion that she now enjoys.

Amen and amen.